So, I decided to write this small article and some helpful tips on how to market a new book since I have gone through many many books, specifically science fiction and fantasy. Most of the articles I have seen out there are basically to some effect the following tips:
1.) Create a Facebook page, Amazon author page.
2.) Sell to family and friends
3.) Use crowdfunding
4.) Create a personal website/blog to promote your own material
The following are tips from the most populare article when you type in Google, market your new book form the New York Times:
1.) Create your brand
2.) Create a website
3.) Create an email list
4.) Choose the right audience for marketing
5.) Reach out to book reviewers
6.) Choose the right book cover
7.) Offer your book on Amazon for free
8.) Amazon Ads
9.) Facebook marketing
I have a problem with some of these and I’ll break down the downside to this advice which is basically useless but I’ll try to add my two cents in giving good advice for marketing a book, so lets break them down one by one.
- ) Create your brand….sounds simple for an author at the New York times to say, but for an unknown author this is incredibly hard. Just this advice is what many marketers go to school for years to achieve simply offering advice like that to new authors is bad advice. The reason I say this is because as I pointed out its easy for some author there in New York with millions of readers already at their fingertips to say but try doing that on a string budget. That’s like a computer programmer telling someone who wants to create their own hit program to “just build a program”.
- ) Create a website — Again for people who don’t know the ins and outs of a good website they may just be wasting their money on something that never produces a return. It is good to have a website to sell it to people you meet at comic cons and things to check out, but doing a proper website beyond using something like wix is beyond most authors who are otherwise busy writing their material. Thats like asking a web designer who needs content to “just write your own novel”. Web designers make web pages, authors write, the best is when they can get together. Web pages also need quite a bit of tweaking for the SEO to be properly done, which is why this advice is horribly vague.
- Create an email list. While good advice, and you most likely should have an email list, the article does nothing more than just say you should have one. I’m not sure if the author of this article has ever done this on a shoestring budget.
- Choose the right audience for marketing. This advice is in my opinion the most executable for the novice author as marketers and web developers will have as much a clue as the correct demographic as the author who wrote the book. The authors guess is as good as theirs, so finding the right demographic, I believe, is the focus of the new author in this list.
- Reach out to book reviewers — I know nothing of book reviewers and I won’t pretend to either. No comment either postive or negative on this one, please comment below via the disqus commenting system for any thoughts on this.
- Choose the right book cover — Now this one is good…I would say this is high on the doable list by the author and should be within the budget of most authors. This one I believe is good advice. The value of a good cover cannot be understated.
- Free offer on Amazon. Hmmm…I”m 50/50 on this because it may work for some people, and better to offer for free than a price in my opinion to get reviews if you believe in it. However, the competition remains high for free books but there are positive and negative things to be said about offering a free book.
- Use Ads on Amazon — I haven’t tried this but I’d like to know how it works out! By all means try it and if it works I”m all ears!
- Facebook marketing — I would say this depends on whether you believe you have the social skills to interact and continue to interact with your followers, which can be a waste of money IF you are not comfortable interacting with the people who follow you on Facebook and your Facebook page.
Please comment on how you feel my commentary analysis is on the New York Times article:
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